Sun

Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz on Wednesday left the latest in a series of unsubtle hints that the company plans to launch a server line based on its new UltraSparc T1 "Niagara" processor next week.

"We're about to introduce an eight-core platform with four threads per chip," said Schwartz, describing the most notable attribute of the UltraSparc T1 during a conference call about Sun's latest software strategy.

Among the other indications that the Niagara systems are imminent: In November, Chief Executive Scott McNealy said the servers would debut late this quarter. The company repeated … Read more

Hewlett-Packard plans to unveil new utility computing services Tuesday and tout its research efforts in the area.

Utility computing means a different things to different people, but generally involves paying for computer processing power as it's consumed. Sometimes that means switching on new capacity in a server when it's needed, in this case, it likely involves tapping into servers run by HP.

Two HP executives are scheduled to speak: Brian Fowler will discuss HP's new Flexible Computing Services, and Karen Walker talk about a collaboration HP Services and HP Labs involving … Read more

Claire Giordano, the Sun executive who led the introduction of the Sun's OpenSolaris operating system project and its accompanying open-source Community Development and Distribution License, is leaving the company for a to work for Amazon's A9 search engine project.

Giordano announced the move on her blog Sunday. OpenSolaris is an ambitious project to restore the relevance of Sun's Solaris version of Unix by making it open-source software. One of Solaris' chief rivals, Linux, was open-source from the start, but competitors, including IBM's AIX, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX and Microsoft's Windows, remain proprietary.

"OpenSolaris is now … Read more

Intel has caught up to rival Advanced Micro Devices with its dual-core chips for dual-processor and four-processor servers. But with the chips, Intel still lags AMD in one important domain: power consumption.

Intel recommends server maker design power and cooling around a chip's "thermal design power." TDP measures the power needed to run conventional software at full tilt and is generally about 90 percent of the maximum power that the chip could conceivably require.

Intel argues that its dual-core chips, code-named Paxville and released in October, can be dropped into the same server designs as their single-core … Read more

Sun Microsystems executives last week were eager to talk about the early arrival of servers using the company's "Niagara" processor, and now it appears that launch could come as soon as Monday.

Niagara is the spearhead of Sun's effort to reinvigorate its Sparc processor family, which after delays and lackluster performance has lost popularity to IBM's Power family and to x86 processors such as Intel's Xeon and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron. Niagara has eight separate processing cores, each able to handle four instruction sequences called threads.

During a conference call last week about Sun's quarterly financial results, … Read more

A revamp of Sun Microsystems' ZettaByte File System is done, and the software has been incorporated into Solaris and soon will be publicly available in a trial version, according to a lead programmer on the project. The software controls how computers store data on storage systems, and Sun boasts of ZFS's reliability, flexibility, capacity and administration ease.

"ZFS will hit the street in a couple of weeks via Solaris Express," said lead ZFS architect Jeff Bonwick in his blog Monday. Solaris Express is free, but unlike full-fledged Solaris, it includes nearly final features so customers can get … Read more

A collaborative programming philosophy and developer freedoms aren't the only Linux features Sun Microsystems emulated when it adopted an open-source development model for its operating system, Solaris.

It also picked up some of the legal baggage. When Red Hat, the top Linux seller, filed to hold its initial public offering, it disclosed some risks related to its open-source software in its legal filings. Among them were reliance on non-employees such as Linux leader Linus Torvalds and software company's possible reluctance to write software not controlled by a single company. (Such risk disclosures are a standard part of regulatory … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos faced familiar skepticism Wednesday about the profit margins of Sun's business--but this time it was from Bill Coleman, a former Sun executive and business partner who now is chief executive and co-founder of Cassatt.

Coleman oversaw Sun's move from its SunOS operating system to its current Solaris product in the early 1990s, then founded BEA Systems, which sells software to let servers run Java programs. Now he's in charge of Cassatt, which sells software designed to automatically move programs among a group of servers so data centers work smoothly … Read more

On the same day that programmers released version 2 of OpenOffice.org, survey results showed a significant opportunity for the open-source rival to Microsoft Office.

By 2010, 22 percent of companies surveyed by Saugatuck Technology expect their core desktop productivity programs will be open-source software. The survey polled more than 100 senior executives, about 80 percent in the United States and the rest from other parts of the world.

"That's a big number when you consider Microsoft has about 95 percent market share," said Saugatuck president Bill McNee.

Among areas, 28 percent said open-source software would at … Read more